When Gaetano Grossatesta
moved to Naples in 1745, he already had behind him some 20
years of experience in northern Italy as a respected
choreographer or direttore
di ballo [dance]. (The term coreografo was not
then in general use.*note)
He was well primed to take over the job of ballet director
at the new San Carlo Theater.
By the end of his life, some 30 years later, he had
composed the dances (and music for those dances) for the
first performances of about 100 operas in both northern
Italy and in Naples and had collaborated with composers of
distinction such as Vivaldi, Albinoni, Hasse and Gluck.
Today he is almost totally forgotten. It’s hard to say why
except that the passage of time and changing artistic
tastes can conspire to make almost anyone obscure. (See
the series on “Obscure Composers.”)
Ballet, perhaps, has special problems in that it didn’t
really exist as a separate art form until the early 1800s.

Today,
it makes sense to say “Let’s go to the ballet” or “opera”
or “concert” because we see dance, melodrama, and
symphonic music as separate disciplines. In the late
1600s, however, it made no sense at all because everything
revolved around opera; opera was the vehicle within which
instrumental music and dance were presented. There were
not yet such things as “symphony number this” or “piano
concerto number that.” And though there were social dances
and court dances in Paris, the capital of early ballet,
such dance was a long way from appearing separately on a
stage for you to enjoy.

Ballet,
in the form of staged versions of social and court dances,
was incorporated into early opera (meaning all of the
1600s) either within an act or as an interval between
acts. The dancers wore elaborate court or theatrical
costumes of the day (women wore formal gowns down to the
ankles); that type of dance is referred to today as
“Baroque dance.” There were no tutus, ballet slippers, pointe work or flying
Russian dancers in tights bounding over the stage almost
like low-flying trapeze artists. That Baroque situation
passed from France into Italian ballet of the early 1700s
where the direttoredi ballo was
usually mentioned in printed programs but was otherwise
somewhat neglected. Very importantly, while you can easily
find notated music from that period, very few examples of
notated dances have survived (in the Beauchamp–Feuillet
notation, for example, from the 1600s, a sample of which
is seen in the photo insert, above). Thus we can't really
say with precision what dance in early opera looked like.
(Fortunately, some notation from Grossatesta’s ballets
survive.)

Grossatesta’s
career rose with opera
seria (the name given to those operas from the
1600s and 1700s that were based on themes from Greek
mythology and, thus, "serious") where dance often helped
to move the plot along; his career faded with age and with
the advent of Ballet
d'action, a new ballet movement started by French
choreographer Jean Georges Noverre in 1760, in which
dancers expressed their character and emotion through
their movements rather than through elaborate props and
costumes—in other words, the beginning of modern ballet.There is
little information about Grossatesta’s family and
background. The earliest reference to his work is from
1720 in Venice. He had at least one brother, Antonio, who
is mentioned in one of Casanova’s letters. The brother
became the impresario of the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice
and engaged Gaetano as choreographer in 1729. Gaetano may
also have performed as a dancer on the stage. (Bear in
mind that this was when any gentleman could dance; this
means simply that he would have been one in a group of
seven or eight dancers performing a dance that he,
himself, had worked out—"choreographed.")

Ballet Dancer
by Edgar DegasAfter Grossatesta moved
to Naples, the situation of ballet started to change for
the better; that is, the librettos offered progressively
more information on the dances, and these balli are often
described in detail. It isn’t clear if Grossatesta
composed the ballet parts of the opera that opened the San
Carlo Theater on November 4, 1737, Achille in Sciro
(with music by Domenico Sarro
and libretto by Metastasio).
San Carlo literature on the subject says that Grossatesta,
indeed, directed the balli,
but original program notes have not survived. It would
have been plausible even though the date is some seven
years before he moved to Naples; it was common for those
in the theater to maintain working relationships
throughout the Italian peninsula even without a unified
nation. One source (Giordano), however, points out, that
Grossatesta was verifiably not the choreographer for the
second opera to appear at San Carlo; thus, in absence of
proof, there is no reason to assume that he was there on
opening night a few weeks earlier.In any event,
Grossatesta was composer and director of balli for San Carlo
from 1745 to 1752 and its impresario from 1753 to 1769. As
a choreographer, he was an innovator, and as impresario,
in general, he was always on the lookout for new talent,
new composers, new operas. One who benefitted from
Grossatesta’s willingness to give young composers a break
was Niccolò Piccinni,
who debuted at San Carlo with the opera Zenobia in 1756.
Piccinni became the best-known Italian composer of opera
for the next 20 years, that is, until Paisiello, Cimarosa and the generation of
Mozart-competitors in Italy. In Naples, Grossatesta was
also the Maestro di
ballo delle Serenissimi Reali Infanti ("Dancing
Master to the Most Serene Royal Children").There seems
to be no consensus as to why Grossatesta left a job that
most persons of that era would have kept until death. It
may have had to do with the working conditions. Under the
intellectual and cultured Charles
III—by all accounts, the classical “benevolent
monarch”—the conditions were excellent: essentially, Here is a fine new theater;
do what you will to make it a great one. When
Charles abdicated to return to Spain, his minor son,
Ferdinand, took over—the infamous Re Lazzarone (Beggar
King). Again, by all(!) accounts,
Ferdinand was a dunce and a lout. (One such account is here.) Grossatesta apparently
had a good working relationship with the young king’s
regent, Bernardo Tanucci, but
the child monarch came of age in 1767. Ferdinand had no
ear for music, but they say he liked the dancing parts
enough to wake up in the royal box and follow them. Maybe
that wasn’t enough for Grossatesta. Two years later, he
left and disappeared so quietly that no one seems to know
where he went or even exactly where or when he died.*note: The first to use the
term "choreography" was Raoul-Auger Feuillet in 1700: “Chorégraphie, ou Art de
décrire la dance par caractères, signes et figures
démonstratives [Choreography, the art of
describing dance through characters, signs and graphic
symbols.] The author's name is remembered today in the
name of the dance notation system, Beauchamp-Feuillet.